What a thousand dollars worth of plywood and plylox looks like:

That’s thirty sheets of half-inch plywood and fourteen bags of plylox. It cost us just over a thousand dollars. Ouch.
I don’t mind laying out the money for a little protection. That’s just the Dummy Tax for living on the Texas gulf coast. What I really […]

In August, 2001 we moved into our new house. We had lots of things to worry about. Hurricanes weren’t on the high-priority list, but we’ve been in the Houston area long enough to know that, eventually, one would become a very high priority. Over the years, we had a series of conversations that can be […]

Every time I saw Wendy yesterday she’d say “Well, Katrina still hasn’t turned to the north.” I’m still not 100% convinced that she’s going where they say she will, but it’s becoming clear that she’s headed for somewhere along the Louisiana coast.
Most national news sources are covering the Katrina story, so you all probably know […]

Dear Katrina,
Please turn north. We’ve had an excellent summer so far, and we don’t want you ruining it. So please turn north and visit the good people of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana. And please do so immediately.
Sincerely,
The Texas Gulf Coast

PS: The Central Florida Hurricane Center is now using a Google Map to keep track […]

(This is the post I was trying to mail to my weblog last night when I discovered that mail wasn’t getting through.)
In June we complained about how dry the weather was. In July we’re complaining about how wet it is. We can’t seem to find a happy in-between. Wendy told me about a storm that […]

This storm woke me up at about 5:30 this morning. It started with lightning and booming thunder, and eventually turned into a steady rain. It’s been raining off and on for most of the past two or three days in the Houston area. The rain has been a welcome relief from the near-drought conditions we […]

Today I put the final finished touches on the backyard deck: I treated it with a waterproofer. I chose one that claims to prevent the wood from graying, which I suppose means it includes a UV blocker. I applied the treatment with a little garden sprayer, which made the work easy, but in hindsight seems […]

Looks like more bad weather is on the way. We’ve been seeing lightning all evening, but now radar shows the storm front is upon us. We’re hearing thunder, and Rudy is barking. Should make for a rollicking evening.

Judging from what we’re hearing so far, this storm is more about rain and wind than lightning and […]

Summer and I went out last week and looked at bird baths, knowing that’s what we all wanted to get Wendy for Mother’s Day this year. We looked around and saw a nice big one that would look great in the back yard, but held off on buying it. We were afraid we’d pick something […]

Another project I worked on this past weekend was the deck: finishing the trim work, and putting in more decorative gravel.
Trim work: a box to hide the concrete footer and sonotube, and a facia piece to hide the bracket.
What the deck looks like with the trim work finished.

The weekend Wendy and the girls went to Destin, I built this partition around the A/C units so they don’t look quite so ugly. This weekend our neighbor gave us a load of rainbow gravel (thanks Selena!) which we used to finish around the units. The partition still needs painting, which I’ll do after the […]

You’ve all heard about it. Some of you are probably sick of hearing about it. Be glad I don’t tell you the story of how we almost dug a pool instead of just building a deck. Well, I’ll talk no more: our new deck is now finished, and here is its story, with pictures, start to finish…